


Glimpse

by robaca (goodlamb)



Category: Lizzie Bennet Diaries
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future, Autistic Character, Domesticity, Drunkenness, Episode 60 Are You Kidding Me!, F/M, Future Fic, Glimpse Into the Future, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-03
Updated: 2017-01-03
Packaged: 2018-09-14 08:54:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9171994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goodlamb/pseuds/robaca
Summary: After a night of binge drinking and binge watching Lizzie's videos (immediately post love declaration, Ep. 60), Darcy wakes up and things are...different.





	1. Waking Up

**Author's Note:**

> One of those "glimpse into the future" fics, which is a trope I love that doesn't seem to have a recognized name? I guess I'm naming it lol.

Darcy wakes slowly, feeling warm and comfortable, which is not the dried-mouth and rolled-over-by-a-semi feeling he had been foreseeing when he had passed out on the couch. He didn't even have the presence of mind to take ibuprofen before he fell asleep, he's sure.

He does a few more internal status checks of his person, stretching out his toes and ankles as he is wont to do in the mornings, and his feet hit the wooden foot of the bed. He registers two things, quickly: one, he is not in any bed that is in his home, certainly not on the couch, and two, he is in bed with _someone else_.

He opens his eyes fully, looking up straight at the ceiling since he has, as usual, slept flat on his back. He does not know this ceiling. His family has near over a dozen estates and his home in San Francisco has six rooms, and he would swear on his life that this ceiling is not in any of them.

He turns his head towards the warmth emanating from his left, the unmistakable feeling of the side of a bed bowed by another person's weight. A woman, her back to him. Pale skin. A shock of dark red hair. 

 Oh god. Oh god oh god oh god. 

 He lets out a sound that Gigi would mostly likely describe as a _yelp_ , and falls out of bed. 

"Whaa—?" he hears from above him, and he ignores her, stays on the ground a minute, trying to run through the possibilities in his mind. Lizzie...followed him back to his place, after the implosion that was his ill-planned declaration of love? No, he's established that he's not in his own home. He...went to hers? The dorms at Pemberly? That's just....that can't be. He doesn't remember anything beyond passing out on the couch. He certainly wouldn't have driven in the condition he was in last night. Not to mention the fact that Lizzie has clearly established she would die before spending a night in a shared bed with him.

 "Hey," he hears, in a sleep rough voice. "Are you on the ground? What are you doing down there, weirdo?" she asks, voice incredulous. That's at least...more familiar. When he says nothing, still shocked into silence, she groans. "Ugh, can you get back up here and help me flip?"

He's confused enough by that to try to rise and follow her instructions. 

Standing at his full height he has a fuller view of Elizabeth, sprawled in a wide bed that is not his own, with tangled white sheets, an empty space left where he was just lying. Lizzie is still waking up, yawning and rubbing at her eyes, which gives him enough time to subtly have an existential crisis.

Lizzie, beneath the expanse of her alabaster shoulders and underneath her thin sleep shirt, is obviously, and preponderously, pregnant.

He stares, and blinks what must be 80 times in 12 seconds. He doesn't know much about pregnancy, but he knows that she is at least some, to very many several months along, and he's quite sure that no matter what he had to drink, that sort of thing can't happen in a night.

Lizzie is yawning again and blinking herself awake, though at a more leisurely pace. She groans again in his general direction, her neck twisted toward him even as most of her body has decided to remain pointed at the far wall. "Hey, dingbat, help me _fliiiiiip_ ," she says, whining and drawing out the last word like an overtired toddler.

Not knowing what else to do, he moves to follow her instructions, yet again.   

He reaches out for her over the empty side of the bed, feeling fearful about touching her, but before he can, she sighs and says, "No, I think you gotta come at it from this side," gesturing with her head. He nods to himself, and to her, and walks the little path around their...the bed. He notices that while his side is, as per usual for how he keeps his things, impeccable, as he crosses the middle divide of the floor between his side of the bed and hers, dropped clothes and stacked books begin to sprout up like toadstools. He comes to Lizzie's side. He freezes again at the prospect of putting his hands on her, especially on her....middle.

Maybe she's not pregnant. Maybe she grew a spontaneous tumor, or...or has some sort of internal bleeding, and he ought to be getting her to the E.R. right now.

Lizzie lets out a heavy sigh, and says, "The little bugger was dancing on my kidneys all night. You're lucky I didn't pee all over you." 

Well. Not a tumor then.

He places his hands in two logical positions, supporting just behind her shoulders and down by her lower waist. He does the mental equivalent of holding his breath, thinking absolutely nothing, not even registering the warmth under his palms. She only needs a little help in the form of a push until she can, not so much flip over as, _roll_ , slowly, onto her other side. She sighs dreamily in apparent relief. “Thanks,” she says, eyes fluttering closed again.

He has no idea what’s going on but even now he’s struck by how beautiful she is.

He clears his throat and musters up a, “You’re welcome,” and she chuckles a little, so it must sound like a joke. He backs away on bare feet towards, well, what looks like the door to the bathroom. He shuts the door behind him, quietly, and takes in a few quick breaths.

Fuck. Fuck. Damn damn damn. He’s lost his mind, then? That’s got to be it? He’s gotten so lonely that he’s hallucinated a _pregnant_ Elizabeth Bennet, in his bed, and an entire…world to go with it.

Unless he’s still asleep? And he’s dreaming? He looks around the bathroom and fumbles for a light switch. When he flicks it on, he’s shocked by his own image in the wall-to-wall mirror.

He, always with a mind for detail, takes quick stock of himself— he's wearing the pinstriped 100% cotton Ralph Lauren men's pajamas that he's bought pairs of continuously since he was sixteen. That's a bit of a comfort: at least in whatever weird universe this is, his exact pair is still in production. That’s a load off his mind.

Focus, Darcy. Get it together.

He faces the mirror and slaps himself in the face.

“Oww _www_ ,” he says quietly.

“Darcy? You okay in there?” he hears from outside. Not quietly enough, apparently.

“Um, yes, yeah, yes, I’m fine.”

He stares at himself again. Aside from the pajamas and his now slightly red cheek, he looks…. Well. He can’t…he can’t quite put a finger on it.

He runs one palm over his face, feeling his 5 o’clock shadow, the line of his jaw. He pulls at the bags under his eyes, fixes the straying hairs of his eyebrows. When he runs his hand over his scalp (looking for…a head wound?) he’s slowly surprised to find that there’s less there than he remembers. He tips his head down in the mirror to get a good look at what is most definitely the early formation of a baldspot. In the back of his mind he can see his father standing in front of his own bathroom mirror with a bottle of Rogaine, saying, “Thinning, dear, just _thinning_!” as his mother laughs behind one hand.

He looks…older. More like his father did then.

Good God. He needs his phone. He needs his phone very very badly.

He flushes the toilet at the last moment after a burst of anxiety over what Lizzie must be hearing from the bedroom, and runs the sink for good measure. Then he opens the bathroom door back up, slowly, feeling like he’s creeping through an abandoned home in one of Fitz’s horror movies.

It’s all for naught, evidently, because Lizzie seems to be again asleep, head tipped back and mouth open as she snores, raucously.

He looks her over again, now that he has the chance and feels less on display. She’s only just visible in the faint morning light as it streams through the blinds. She's wearing…nearly nothing at all. Her striking red hair is all in a mess around her neck, a few strands caught near her mouth; her long, pale legs are twisted in the sheets, but bare, leading up to a blue pair of modest underthings. He flushes, feeling like he's looking at something he shouldn't. Above that, a ratty tang top that has understandably ridden up to reveal her heavily swollen stomach.

He swallows, stuck there in place.

Lizzie breaks off, suddenly, mid-snore, and says, without opening her eyes, “Are you up for real? Are you making coffee?” She, it seems reluctantly, raises one eyelid to peer at him. “If so, you should bring me coffee.”

He tries to smile, and give some little sort of nod. Even in this possible nightmare scenario, it’s hard not to be charmed by Lizzie Bennet. For all that she did her best to break his heart yesterday. Lizzie closes her eyes again.

He spots what must be his phone, resting on a little table next to the side of the bed he woke up on. He pads over to it, and takes it in hand. Doesn’t look like his phone, and, as he turns it over in his palm, it doesn’t really feel like any phone he’s ever owned. He gets caught up for a moment, feeling the smoothed curves of it, the little black glass thing. It seems to chirp awake at the touch of his handhold. Little blue words pop up in a pleasing faded font. GOOD MORNING WILLIAM! it says. YOU WOKE UP BEFORE YOUR ALARM!, and as the words appear so does a digital clock-front just below it, displaying 6:46 am, as well as a weather report and a date for the day after Halloween. The same date as the morning he meant to wake up hungover, with a crick in his neck, on his too-short living room couch.

He grips the phone tighter in his palm, and leaves the bedroom, and Lizzie, behind a closed door.

The house he’s in is a more modest one than any of those in which he grew up, but strangely reminiscent of his childhood home. He recognizes some of the art on the walls as pieces from his mother’s collection— which, as far as he knows, are deep in the recesses of storage in the New York brownstone. He pauses to look out the window by the stairs, seeing a quiet but urban street, and trees surrounded by little gates at every break in the sidewalk. He can’t recognize the city he’s in at a glance— not New York, he’s fairly certain, but L.A. is so far and wide that you could turn the corner and be in a different world.

He descends the staircase, trying not to look at the family portraits on the wall—his eyes trip over faces that he quickly registers as Gigi, as Lizzie, as Lizzie’s redheaded sisters, as Bing. Instead he focuses on the plush feel of the carpet under his feet. He’s always been a particular man as far as textures go, and the way his toes sink into the shag is, for whatever reason, calming.

The downstairs is as homey as the top level was. Everything’s done in blue tones, slate grays and subtle purples. Natural light everywhere. Modern finishings. The creeping feeling that this is exactly the home he would design for himself is raising hair on the back of his neck.

He finds his way into what must be some sort of living space-cum-office, just off of a formal dining room. There’s comfortable seating and a desk set up with a hideaway computer monitor, drawers and what look like filing cabinets every which way. He takes a seat in one of the nice chairs, and leans over on his knees, peering down at his sleek phone.

It chirps again as he looks at it, and some offshoot of his brain is wondering if it might be activated by some combination of touch and eye-movement analysis. He puts that thought aside as he tries to get to the home screen. The interface is foreign, but as he swipes up and right and left he gets to something that looks close enough to the apps he knows. Bottom right, where he’s always kept his go-to functions for easy access, is a pretty and familiar looking app. A teal and white color scheme. _Domino._

He opens it up, and it’s quite different from the beta version he has on his phone. But if he remembers correctly…he holds his thumb down on the main screen until he hears a little beep, and says aloud, in a clear voice, “Domino, call Gigi.”

CONNECTING.

He breathes a sigh of relief at at least something coming together. He has his sister’s number. Everything will make sense—if not soon, then close to soon.

The video chat connects after another few moments of pleasant beeps and boops. A black screen for a moment, and then—

Georgianna. He sighs again, and can’t help but smile, albeit subdued and perhaps a little crazed.

“Hey big bro!” she says, bright and bubbly. He’s captivated by her face. It’s the same Gigi he’s always known: to him she will always look like the new baby home from the hospital, and the 18 year old with George Wickham half naked on her couch, and the 11 year old that had to sleep in his room for a month after the plane crash.

This Gigi has grown her hair out, and she looks stunningly like their mother, even in the confines of the little box in his hand. She’s sitting at what looks like an office desk, an abstract painting on the wall behind her, and she has an extra piercing in one ear that he doesn’t remember, a feather earring hanging down and intermingling with her hair. He can’t do anything but breathe out and look at her for a minute. This seems to worry her, if the wrinkle in her brow says anything. “Darce? You there? Can you hear me?” she says, and then looks off-screen for a second. “Woah, isn’t it like 6 in the morning there? What are you doing awake?”

He stills finds himself unable to make words. He makes a few little grasping noises, but nothing else comes out. Gigi creases her eyebrows again further.

Until a light seems to come to her eyes, and she grins. “Oh, wait, is this baby drama? Are you having another daddy freak-out?” He just widens his eyes in response, and she giggles.

“Darce, you need to calm down, do some of Lizzie’s breathing exercises. Everything’s gonna be a-okay, he’s gonna have all his fingers and toes, he’s going to have beeeeauuutiful genes—” that part she sings “—the delivery will go a _ma_ zing.” There she slows down, and looks at the camera tenderly. “And Darce,” she says, her smile warm, “you’re going to be a wonderful father.”

There’s a noise behind her off screen, and she turns her head, long earrings flipping with her hair. “Yeah, just a minute.”

She turns back and says, “Sorry Will, I’ve got a meeting! I’ll call you when I get out, all right?”

He swallows and gets out, “All, all right.”

She grins and says, “Love you!” before the screen goes black with a little beep. “I love you too,” he whispers back to it.

After Gigi’s voice is gone, the empty downstairs is eerily quiet. He’s never liked being in places he’s unfamiliar with. Especially not alone. He feels like he’s in someone else’s home without them being present, like one of those few and far between times in his youth when he slept the night at a friend’s and woke up before anyone else.

He levers himself out of his chair, to quiet the urge to _do_ something.

He pads on bare feet out of the living area, finding the kitchen easily enough. This is a smaller place than he grew up with– smaller than any of the various homes his family had, if he’s being honest. But he likes it. The color palette continues into the long space of the kitchen, though the blues are warmer and sunnier now, with white tile along the walls. He’s never been much of a cook, but as he looks at the gleaming rows of hanging copper pots, at the space-age looking appliances and the small pots of herbs growing by the windowsill, he sees his mother baking with him and Gigi, on one of the few occasions she had time to cook with them. He wonders if this version of himself, the balding one that makes coffee for a pregnant Bennet woman, if he makes the time to use this kitchen.

He shakes his head, blinking rapidly. Coffee. Right. Coffee.

The machine he finds easily enough– it’s still coffee-machine shaped, with a little pod to put in for single-cup portions. He has to fiddle with the settings and searches for a while to figure out how to pop open the top. There are two brands of grounds in the cabinet above the machine; he doesn’t recognize either, and decides to make a cup of each.

While it’s brewing he looks around the kitchen some more. There are some papers scattered on the island in the middle of the room, a high light-colored marble thing surrounded by bar stools. On top of the pile he spies a ring of keys on a rainbow lanyard, a mess of keychains and tokens on the end of the fraying thing. He puts a hand to it, thinking _Lizzie._

What must be his own keys– a sensible set on a plain ring, with a Pemberly card pass– hangs on a magnet on the fridge. There’s a screen there, built into the door, which confuses him, but his attention is quickly captured by the things pinned around it: a paper shopping list, held on by a magnet. A few local takeout menus.

And then pictures.

There’s one of Gigi, smiling bright in a set of hiking clothes, holding one hand up to block out the sun at the top of some sunny summit he doesn’t recognize. There’s a group shot, of him, Lizzie, Fitz, and the youngest Bennet sister, on what looks like New Year’s. A shot of Lizzie, looking more like the woman he knows, smirking wryly at the camera as she’s decked out in full cap and gown, holding a diploma.

He catches himself on a breath when he sees what looks like a Christmas card from Bing and…God, is that Jane? There are two little children on their laps, with Bing’s dark hair and almond shaped eyes, and Jane’s smile, which is echoed on their mother’s face.

He can’t really breathe. He really can’t breathe.

“Heyyy, you were taking too long, is that my dark roast?” he hears, and jumps nearly out of his skin. He didn’t hear Lizzie descend the stairs. Which is a feat, seeing as she is so…ah…behemothic, in her current state.

“Woah,” she says, and he jumps again slightly as her hand comes down on his shoulder. He turns to look at her. She’s pulled her hair up into a messy bun, and put on a pair of sleep shorts and a thin robe. God she looks. Exquisite.

“Lizzie,” he breathes out. Her dark brows are furrowed.

“Darce, is everything okay?” she asks, her cool hand moving to the side of his face. He resists leaning into it. _Your arrogance, pride, and selfishness make you the last man in the world I could_ ever _fall in love with!_ he hears, echoing in his head, getting louder as she goes, as clear as if the Lizzie he saw last night was standing right behind her lookalike’s shoulder, shouting it with all that righteous anger in her eyes.

He breathes out, not sure exactly what expression is on his face. “Should you even be having caffeine?!” he bursts out with. Then blinks. No idea where that came from.

Some of the concern falls out of Lizzie’s expression. She pats his face twice in a gentle slap of sorts, turning away from him in favor of the coffee percolating on the counter. “This is another baby freak out, huh,” she says, grabbing the mug once the stream of coffee stops its last drips. She makes a face. “You used one of your mugs,” she says, sounding plaintive.

She moves across the kitchen to the fridge, evidently to get some creamer. He’s still having a hard time not letting his eyes bulge out of his head, watching her has she waddles, looking practiced at it. “The doc said a few cups of coffee a week won’t kill me,” she says, sing-songing it over a weak layer of indignation, like it’s a fight that’s been had many times before. “And you are not keeping me away from the dark magic for another two months,” she adds, bringing the mug to her lips.

As he just stands there, gaping, she takes a loud slurp and stares back at him.

“This is a baby freak out,” she says again, this time decisively, then takes another sip. “You know, I’m really going to start taking a tally, of yours and mine, just to prove to people when this is all over that I really was the level headed one this whole time.”

He has no reply to that. He just keeps staring at her from across the kitchen.

“Oookay,” she says, putting down her mug on the counter behind her and coming across the room again, her arms sweeping towards him. He doesn’t flinch this time as her hands come up to his shoulders. She tugs him gently to turn him towards the exit of the kitchen.

“Here’s what we’re gonna, bud,” she says as she walks (erm, waddles) him out of the kitchen, into the living room where he called Gigi. “You’re gonna have a nice little lay-down on the couch here,” she says pushing him down by the shoulder onto the plush lounge seater. “Because it’s _way_ too early and neither of us are supposed to go in today.” He doesn’t know what else to do besides lay down as she asked, so he follows her directions. “And you’re gonna have a nice blanket here,” she says, unfolding a fleece thing and dropping it on his legs. He would complain about being babied but. It is a nice blanket.

As it is, he gives her a scathing look, and she gives him a, well, Caroline might call it a _shut the fuck up_ look in return, saying, “Mm hmm. You’re welcome. I’m gonna make something for breakfast, you try and wake up fully, will you?”

He blinks a few times, staring at her blankly as she stands above him, until he nods, a little, and she seems satisfied, walking off towards the kitchen with both hands at her back. He stares at the ceiling after she leaves, as he begins to hear the faraway clinks and clatters of cooking-noises. His eyes begin to droop, blinking slowly and slower still, until he begins to drift off, thinking of the bitter haze that had sent him off to sleep the night before.


	2. The Night Before

As he is about most things, Darcy is very particular when it comes to alcohol. He will, reluctantly, drink Gigi’s girly cocktails, with the pineapple and the candy-colored vodka, and he’ll sip martinis or good red wine with Caroline. He has not drowned himself in beer with Bing since their college days. He has, only once, permitted a Jaeger bomb with Fitz, and he regrets it to this day. But generally, he prefers what his father would have called a man’s drink. Scotch. Single malt. Neat.

Regrettably, the condo in San Francisco is not well stocked, and all he can find is a dusty bottle of bottom shelf tequila, under the kitchen sink. But, seeing as his only goal for the evening is to get completely and utterly obliterated— enough to forget the look in Elizabeth Bennet’s eyes; the sharp bite to her voice; the curl of her lip, so overcome she was with disgust. For that, the tequila will serve.

But God is it awful, he thinks, as he downs another shot. Out of an actual shot glass, of course. He’s not an animal.

He sits there, silent in the darkness of the living room, the only light provided by the blue glow of his laptop screen and the late-night skyline of the city out the balcony doors. He thinks about what an image he must make. How Gigi might mock him for being a sad grump, alone on his couch in the dark.

Lizzie could probably make a video about it. _Ooh, I_ _’m Darcy, I wear this silly hat and am not comfortable in social situations!_

His impression of an impression of himself is probably not up to par.

He’s only gotten halfway through the video blog so far. After the first video he started the drinking. At this point he is just plainly wallowing.

He watches a few more videos. He sees George Wickham smile blithely at the camera. Watches him sidle in close to Lizzie’s side. Touch her cheek.

He thinks of his little sister, sitting, absolutely destroyed, beside him on the couch, and the tequila in his stomach starts to turn. The image of George touching…the image doesn’t leave him, it just loops over itself, until he’s levering himself up off the couch. He makes it to the bathroom in time to empty his stomach into the pristine toilet. He manages to have the clear thought that he’s pleased with the maid service they hire to come while the building’s vacant.

When he finally cleans himself off, he sits back down at the living room couch. He downs a bit more of the goldenrod shite, just to clear out the taste of stomach acid from his mouth. It’s awful. He takes another drink for good measure.

Then, he takes out a sheaf of paper— cotton stock stationery, with the family watermark, in ivory— and his fountain pen. It almost bleeds through the sheet before he writes the first word, but then it starts to flow. Line after line. Angry, slashing words. It starts to get hard to make them out, everything hidden behind a haze of tequila and betrayal and resentment. Self hatred, perhaps most of all. He writes that he revokes every word of that idiotic declaration, takes back his love for the middle Bennet with the shocking red hair. He writes that it was good he dodged that bullet, writes of what a sap he was, thinking he could bridge their wide, wide differences. He writes that he would never see Bing be entrapped into a family of such blind, intolerable people. He almost rips the page with his pen as he writes about how much Wickham has hurt his family, about what a betrayal it was to see Lizzie take him for a friend. He writes bitter words, about what a prideful fool she must be, about how she can’t see the snake beside her for fear of the man who doesn’t like dancing, who’s bad with words. He writes about her vanity, about her lack of common courtesy or good sense or propriety, of how the good people of the world don’t go airing their dirty laundry on _YouTube_ of all places. He writes something sanctimonious or another, some quip about how she’s lucky he doesn’t bring her to court for slander. He writes that her mother would be ashamed. That Elizabeth ought to feel some of the same.

His mother told him once that, with the way his mind worked, words could either be his most faithful friend, or his most dangerous enemy. That he could wield them to help himself, to help others, to make the world make sense— but that he could also wield them like a weapon, to take down everyone around him until he felt safe.

He doesn’t think about that. He pointedly doesn’t think about his mother, or Elizabeth Bennet, or his sister, or Jane Bennet, or Wickham, or how badly he’d like to be anywhere but San Francisco. He doesn’t think about anything at all as he folds the page in half, and falls face first into the couch cushion. He falls into a rancid sleep, overwarm, dreams taken over by the black nothingness of abject misery.

He’s going to feel so sick tomorrow.


	3. The Morning After

When Darcy wakes again, curled onto the just-long-enough couch, he feels a heavy weight on his legs. It takes him another second to come online enough to blink his eyes open. There is that ceiling again, a ceiling that, once again, fails to be the one inside his _own home._ He sighs, quietly.

He still has the phone in the pocket of his pajamas. He pulls it out, still flat on the couch, to check the time. Still not his phone. But a much more reasonable 8:38 am.

He puts it back in his pocket and starts to feel more aware of his body, stretching shoulders and fingers and toes. It’s strange, to be somewhere so foreign and so unknown, to recognize that he is so adrift, and at the same time be so…comfortable. It feels almost like a betrayal, that his body would relax into the warmth and rhythm of this alien house. He looks down at his lower half, which is comfortably…weighted down. There’s a blanket there, that wasn’t there before— when the rotund and future Lizzie Bennet left him to go and make some sort of Donna-Reed-esque continental breakfast. The blanket lays over top the nice blue fleece, so he has to believe that she came back to lay another one on top of him. He runs his hand over the (also blue, but darker) quilted fabric; he lifts up a corner of the thing, feels its heft, drops it back down. Its squares are full of beads, or something else, like rice. It’s heavy.

He stares at it, curious, and keeps running a hand slowly over its smooth surface. The feel of it pressing down is comforting in a way he can’t describe. No matter how weird his surroundings are right now, something in him doesn’t want to get up.

But he does.

He steps quietly back into the kitchen, wood slick but not overly cold like ceramic would be. He wonders distantly if it’s linoleum disguised as wood, not feeling as rough as slats of the real thing. But thoughts of textures and building materials are thrown out the window as he moves in view of Elizabeth.

She’s seated at the end of the big oak table, which takes up half of the dining/cooking space, surrounded by two long benches and a handful of chairs. He wonders if they entertain a lot of company. Now it seems Lizzie is sat down in a chair that doesn’t match the rest of the set— it’s a cozy-looking, padded office thing that’s been pulled up to the kitchen table. She is leaning forward onto the tabletop with the help of some wedged pillows behind her back— her blue robe is bunched up at the elbow, her red hair is still pulled back, strands falling into her face. A plate of uneaten eggs and potatoes, and what looks like slices of raw tomato, sits beside what has captured most of her attention: a thick stack of papers held together by a clip. She is going through the page line by line with an actual red pen. Her face is drawn tight with concentration. He can do nothing but stare.

It takes only another moment or so of him standing there in silence for her to look up, and for two expressions to pass very quickly over her face— surprise, mildly, and then the fondest sort of simple happiness that he could imagine. Yet another look he’s never seen on her, excluding, maybe, a glimpse at the way she would smile at her friend Charlotte, or at one of her sisters, when she thought he wasn’t around to see. To have it turned on him feels much like he believes the spotlight of a helicopter would to a man adrift at sea.

“Hey, sleepyhead. I was just getting some work done,” she says, gesturing down to her papers. “How are you feeling?”

He nods, absently, moving forward. It’s not an answer to her question really but she seems to accept it with a smile, and looks back to her work.

“Breakfast is still next to the stove,” she says, idly. As if automated, he follows her direction, and by some sort of instinct finds the cabinet with the plates. He spoons a modest helping of scrambled eggs and a generous heap of fried cube potatoes, avoiding the red slices on the cutting board altogether; he refills his mug. Then he joins Lizzie at her seat.

He eats a few bites of his home fries, having some argument internally about how the carbs and calories shouldn’t count since it’s arguably not his body that will be digesting it, but largely, he just watches the woman beside him. She is wearing a pair of reading glasses he’s never seen before, but which suit her, and there is a wrinkle in her brow when she reads something troubling.

He is realizing that, regardless of the months and months he’s lived since coming into the Bennet family’s orbit, he has never shared her space like this. He’s never made such time with her. There were the feeble attempts he made to drop by Collins and Collins, to…”run in” to her at her place of work, and of course there were the parties during which he mostly kept his smart phone between them as a shield. And that’s disregarding all the little moments in which he managed to offend her without even being aware of it.

He’d been enraptured, regardless.

But now he’s wondering if, in these months of turmoil and infatuation, in all of the second-guessing and trying to interpret every glance as either a look of scorn or another coy step in their unspoken game of flirtation, in all of this time spent in his head, watching for her from afar…if during all of that he really didn’t get to know her at all.

The grown-up Lizzle Bennet, with her years of experience on him, with surety in her step and a relaxed confidence in her shoulders, slashes something out with her pen. He doesn’t know his Lizzie. And he certainly doesn’t know this one.

But he thinks he’d like to get the chance to.

“This is nice,” he murmurs.

She looks up. Smiles. Blindingly. “It is,” she says.

He takes another sip of his coffee.


	4. The True Morning After

At first all he can register is the veins-full-of-hardening-cement feeling, the rolled-over-and-stomped-on feeling that is weighing down on his head and his chest and his…everything. “Eughh,” Darcy moans, the noise coming out guttural through his dry throat and cotton mouth.

Even his eye sockets feel like they’ve been varnished in a thin layer of acid. He peels open his eyelids to stare at…

The ceiling!

He jolts up, heart wrapping against his chest. His ceiling!

Well, all right, the ceiling of his family’s condo in San Fran. And this is his family’s condo’s couch. _God bless,_ he thinks.

He relaxes his shoulders back into the cushion until he realizes he’s been sleeping like that (all night?) and has a crick in his neck. “Ow,” he says, and sits up.

The living room is a bit of a wreck. Apparently last night he’d knocked the furniture about while stumbling, dumped the carefully arranged throw pillows, and spilled something on the cream white area rug. The coffee table is ringed with tacky circles of drying tequila and balled up pieces of paper— they must be false starts to that….

Letter.

Just the thought of it wakes him up fully. He reaches, slowly, for the slim folded-over page that sits in the middle of the table, pristine in the midst of all the mess. Gone is the excited relief of waking up in his own home, away from any dreams or other nonsense that were plaguing him during the night. He thumbs at the paper. The feeling of it is sobering.

He unfolds it. Within reading the first line he is flushed with so much shame that it is hard to read the rest, but he does, quickly. Just to remind himself of his own words.

Darcy stands up. His mind is already organizing a series of simple steps, ordering them into a list of shuffling tiles, a list quickly arranging itself into an agenda ranked by efficiency and priority. He leaves the letter on the low table. He goes to the bathroom to brush the worst thing he’s ever tasted out of his mouth. On the way back he stops by the hall closet where he knows there is a spare ashtray. He stops in the kitchen, getting the long red pilot lighter from the drawer by the dishwasher.

He returns to the living room to pick up the letter, holding it between thumb and forefinger as to touch it as little as possible.

He takes his haul to the balcony, sitting the heavy ashtray on the barstool out there. Above, the sky is blue, and out there the city is awake, going to work, starting their morning. A dense fog has rolled in down below, laying overtop the water like a second, higher set of waves. He glances down at his wristwatch. 8:58 am. Perhaps the late-morning sun will break it up. Give them some light.

He holds the letter out in front of him, pinching it, like a heavy thing. So curious, a thing so pale and light that could contain such poison. He picks up the lighter and carefully sets one corner of the thing ablaze.

The flame spreads slow, and clean. He watches it eat the paper, copper orange and charcoal black standing out against the blues and grays of the San Francisco skyline. When it reaches the edge of where he can hold it, he drops the thing of ash and soot into the waiting ashtray. He watches until the flame goes out. Then he turns his back and walks away.

He runs through the rest of the agenda quickly. He makes swiftly towards the kitchen, ducking back under the sink for the bottle of Windex that he saw there last night, as well as some cleaning solution and the roll of paper towels from next to the stove. Back to the living room. He straightens the area rug, and douses the stain in the vinegar solution he knows the maids favor, covering it with a paper towel. He folds the throw blankets, fixes the pillows. He brushes the failed attempts at letters into the wastebasket. With a paper towel and a spray of the bright blue Windex, he scrubs away any remnants of tequila. He moves the shot glass to the sink, and fills it with water.

When he is done, and everything is where it should be, he sits back down at the coffee table, with a fresh sheet of paper—cotton stock, family watermark, ivory— and his fountain pen. This time, he begins with an apology.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've read a lot of autistic headcanons for Darcy, and I think it makes a lot of sense both for LBD and for the original text! I tried to include some detail that went in that direction-- weighted blankets are a thing you can buy, they're comforting to all sorts of people. I also like the idea of Darcy and Lizzie like, crafting a home together where they both feel the most at ease >u< I might do some snapshots of them in the Actual Future and not just Alien-Abducting-Darcy-to-the-Future.


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